Most of the news that gushed out of Queen’s Park last week has already washed down the drain. The details of Charles Sousa’s budget are all but forgotten. Tim Hudak’s election was standard. Andrea Horwarth’s was familiar.

But 14 words stuck in the memory of every person who heard them.

On May 1, Colin Andersen, chief executive of the Ontario Power Authority (OPA), told a legislative committee investigating the ballooning cost of cancelling two electricity plants: “To some extent, it’s like a Polaroid picture that takes 20 years to develop.”

He had just revealed that the cost of pulling the plug on the first plant in Oakville had shot up to $310 million. That is almost eight times his agency’s original estimate. He backed up his latest estimate with another armload of “undiscovered” documents — OPA’s third so far.

Two weeks earlier, Ontarians had learned from Auditor General Jim McCarter that the cost of the axing the second plant in Mississauga would be at least $275 — not $180 million as OPA told the government last summer.

The tab for both plants is now $585 million — and still mounting.

Premier Kathleen Wynne could barely keep her temper. “It’s very frustrating not being able to get more concrete answers,” she told the committee.

She is acutely aware that her party made an indefensible mistake in the last election. Cancelling two urban power plants to save four Liberal seats was an abuse of power, a capitulation to the objections of upscale homeowners and a rank misuse of taxpayers’ money.

She has done as much she can — short of denouncing former premier Dalton McGuinty — to insulate herself and her government from the damage. She testified under oath to the committee that she was not consulted about the decision and never briefed on its financial consequences. McGuinty, who testified seven days later, confirmed that he killed the two projects without knowing the cost.

If voters aren’t satisfied, there is a simple solution: Dump Wynne’s government in the next election.

But that won’t stop the price from escalating — for the next 20 years if Andersen is to be believed.

There is no simple, cathartic solution to this problem. But there are ways to get a handle on it:

The first would be to put the cleanup in the hands of someone who can deliver straight answers, hand over all of the relevant information and display some concern for taxpayers’ money.

Andersen has failed on all three counts. His performance at last week’s legislative committee would have been grounds for firing at any private corporation. No competent CEO would tell shareholders that management “messed up some search terms” to account for 20,600 pages of misplaced data. Nor would he resort to a lame analogy about Polaroid photography to explain his inability to estimate the future costs of a bad decision.

Option 2 would be to get rid of the Ontario Power Authority. The Liberals created the independent non-profit agency in 2004 to co-ordinate the energy sector in an open, comprehensible way and take responsibility for its actions.

It has failed the government and the public. Former energy minister Chris Bentley, whose political career was destroyed by OPA, was poised to scrap it. He tabled legislation last spring that would have merged OPA into Ontario’s well-run Independent Electricity Operator. But it died — along with dozens of other bills — when McGuinty prorogued the legislature last October. The Liberals have not revived it. Wynne has said merely “we need a better process going forward.”

Option 3 would be a top-to-bottom shakeup of the energy sector. That is what Conservative Leader Tim Hudak is proposing. As premier, he would remove the government from the electricity business. Private producers would compete to supply the province with power at the lowest cost. The marketplace would be the co-ordinator. The government’s only role would be oversight.

These are the choices Ontarians face. No one’s talking about them now. There is little chance they’ll be debated in an election campaign run by strategists and marketers. But what ultimately matters to voters is who has the best plan to move beyond this sorry saga.

Carol Goar’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

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